I, Terrorist

Caught part of a Star Trek: TNG marathon over the Labor Day weekend, and found myself getting sucked into some great episodes I hadn't seen for a number of years. Among them was "I, Borg," an episode (you will no doubt recall) in which a lone Borg is brought back to the Enterprise for medical treatment, and is soon incorporated into a plan to disable and destroy the entire Borg Collective by means of an impossible geometric shape implanted into the Borg's programming. Captain Picard's history as one who was kidnapped, tortured, and "modified" into a Borg himself changes his usually more reasoned approach to an enemy, and, during the episode, he expresses an unusual degree of animosity toward the Borg. (A similar attitude is presented by Guinan, a character who rarely expresses strong emotions at all, preferring to listen to her customers.)

By contrast, several crew members who are working with the Borg (Dr. Crusher and Geordi) begin to develop a relationship with the Borg and to introduce concepts of individuality and free will to it/him. Eventually, the Borg is given a name ("Hugh") and develops a sense of his own persona apart from the Collective. The crew slowly begins to reconsider Picard's plan to exterminate the entire Collective.

This is one of the best episodes of TNG, one that challenges information presented in previous seasons about the nature of the Borg, who were initially introduced (by Q) as an opponent that Starfleet was in no way prepared to face. Unemotional, implacable, and seemingly unbeatable, the Borg were in many ways presented as the ultimate enemy of the Trek universe. This episode, however, brilliantly dismantles all those assumptions by making the Enterprise crew, and the audience, reconsider the Borg and the nature of individuality.

During the episode, as the crew begins to debate Picard's plan, the following conversation ensues:

Doctor Beverly Crusher: I just think we should be clear about that. We're talking about annihilating an entire race.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Which under most circumstances would be unconscionable. But as I see it, the Borg leave us little choice.

Commander William T. Riker: I agree. We're at war.

Doctor Beverly Crusher: There's been no formal declaration of war.

Counselor Deanna Troi: Not from us, but certainly from them. They've attacked us at every encounter.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: They've declared war on our way of life. We are to be assimilated.

Doctor Beverly Crusher: But even in war there are rules. You don't kill civilians indiscriminately.

Commander William T. Riker: There are no civilians among the Borg.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Think of them as a single collective being. There's no one Borg who is more an individual any more than your arm or your leg.

Doctor Beverly Crusher: How convenient.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: It comes down to this: We're faced with an enemy who are determined to destroy us. And we have no hope of negotiating a peace. Unless that changes, we are justified in doing anything we can to survive.

No doubt this conversation will sound familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper in the last eight years. The original broadcast date of this episode? May 11, 1992.

The episode concludes with the newly individualized "Hugh" choosing to return to the Collective in order to protect his new friends. The hope is that Hugh will retain at least some of the values and insights he gained during his time on board the Enterprise and will thereby influence the Collective to begin operating as less of a single mind and more as a group of individuals, with all the complications and arguments that implies. (The series would revisit the consequences of Hugh's return to the Collective in a few future episodes, which I may also need to revisit.)

I was surprised by how much the episode resonated with me. I believe it was the first time I had seen the episode since 9/11. I was pleased that an episode of TNG had been so far-sighted, but I was more disturbed by the fact that 1) if our current foreign policy is any indication, few seem to have taken these ideas to heart, and 2) that if we choose to follow this course of action we are more likely to be "assimilated" and/or destroyed by our Collective-like enemy than we are to "convert" them to our way of thinking; that is, if we continue to ignore the fact that they, no matter how comforting it may be for us to think otherwise, are made up of individuals, just as we are. As Sting once sang about our Cold War opponenents, "I hope [they] love their children, too."